Edwin Dickinson - Interior

In Interior, 1916, Dickinson's most ambitious and successful painting to this point, he again shows the influence of Hawthorne, particularly in his use of the "Hawthorne stare," in which the eyes look toward the viewer but seemed unfocused, as if dreaming, and in the prominently placed bowl, in keeping with Hawthorne's advice to paint white china. But the combination of images defies understanding as a coherent naturalistic description, with six figures packed together in a tight, vertical mass topped by a man in a green mask yelling at a cat he holds up, an action at odds with the introspective mood of the other figures, all of whom, despite their proximity, seem emotionally disconnected from one another. The picture's title does not relate to its setting, but, as Driscoll notes, is almost certainly taken from the title of a play by Maurice Maeterlinck, performed in New York in 1915, and refers, as does his, to the inner feelings of the characters. Driscoll observes that Maeterinck's play deals with a suicide, and the shared title supports the view that Dickinson's picture is about the death of his brother, represented by the guitarist and also by the screaming figure behind him, who embodies Burgess's interior doubts and uncertainty. Ward suggests that this exploration of psychological states may have been indebted to Edvard Munch and Ibsen, whose play "Ghosts" he read sometime between 1913 and 1915 and may well have associated with his brother's suicide.